Tag Archives: amy poehler

“The safe joy of dancing with theatre boys.” Mean Girls the Musical (2024 film)

20 January 2024

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You know you’re a certain age when films you saw in the theatre in your adult life are being remade with some regularity. I think I first felt this pang when they remade Footloose and “reimagined” The Karate Kid, but actually I had seen neither of those films in the theatre during their original runs (and even now I don’t think I’ve watched either all the way through). Carrie and Robocop appear to get remade every ten minutes, but for some reason this déjà vu feeling doesn’t quite apply to horror movies nor thrillers. Nor to cash grab live action re-dos of Disney animated films. And Endless Love I’d never seen the first time (nor wanted to), and I can barely remember seeing the remake (but apparently I did … thank heavens for this blog’s archive).

However, seeing The Color Purple last month (which I loved) hit a little too close to home. Admittedly, the original came out nearly 40 years ago, but I have clear memories of seeing it on the big screen in 1985 as well as studying it in college.

Annnnd then … Mean Girls hit cineplexes just a few weeks later, another film that became a Broadway hit musical that re-became a film. This one is messing with my temporal triangulation! The first flick, starring Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chabert, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Lizzy Caplan, and Tim Meadows still feels like a “new” movie to me. I know it’s 20 years old … hush. So, I approached this latest iteration with some trepidation. I don’t mind remakes. In fact, I enjoy seeing what people do with a time-tested tale, contemporizing and offering new contextual commentary. I just couldn’t envision how Mean Girls could be revisited without becoming cliché.

Color me wrong. And let’s all wear pink on Wednesdays. The new film musical of Mean Girls is so fetch. Yes, they finally made fetch happen.

In great part because Tina Fey has remained the chief architect of this franchise (does it qualify as a “multiverse” now?), the 2023 Mean Girls keeps its true north around tolerance, acceptance, authenticity, and, yes, feminism. The central thesis of the original film is a) teenagers can be truly awful to each other, b) said behavior is a reflection of endemic misogyny and classism in our society, and c) human beings can be gobsmackingly shallow regardless their age. 

Mean Girls has always offered a wink and a sneer at Hollywood’s arrested development regarding high school-set coming of age stories. On its surface, Mean Girls is just as self-reverentially, um, plastic as, say, Grease or Breakfast Club or anything on The CW. But under the marabou feathers and platform sneakers, Mean Girls is a witty and dark-hearted satire on the state of our have/have-not instant gratification culture. For someone to rise, someone else must fall – why live in abundance when you can elevate yourself by ruining someone else? In this way, Mean Girls has as much Arthur Miller and Nathaniel Hawthorne in its DNA as it does Clueless or Fast Times at Ridgemont High or even Heathers (three other teen-centered flicks that get it right … Easy A and Edge of Seventeen which arrived after the first Mean Girls do so as well).

So what does the addition of wry, at times nightmarishly day-glo and surreal musical numbers add to this mélange? Quite a bit, in fact. My only quibble with the original film was what felt like tonal whiplash between Mel Brooks-level absurdity and Afterschool Special angst and back again. Perhaps unsurprisingly, wedging one teen pastiche pop ditty after another into the mix brings it all into perfect relief. 

Admittedly, the songs by Jeff Richmond (Fey’s husband) and lyricist Nell Benjamin (who also worked on the musically superior Legally Blonde the Musical … I’m sensing a pattern here) are a smidge forgettable. Less than 24 hours later, I couldn’t hum a bar of any number to save my soul. Sorry … “Revenge Party” … THAT one sticks in your head – catchy AND grating at the same time. But no one goes to Mean Girls expecting Sondheim or Rodgers & Hammerstein.

That said, the staging of each number is clever and frisky and fun. The hum drum environs of high school hallways unfold into African pride lands; science labs explode in confetti and parade floats; teen ragers freeze into chiaroscuro tableaus … all while the respective musical confessionals proceed. First time directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. and cinematographer Bill Kirstein run headlong into the delightful kitsch of musical theatre while breaking it wide open cinematically. That ain’t easy. The Hollywood box office is strewn with the corpses of other movie musicals that have tried and really, really, really failed (see: Cats … no don’t).

The cast is damn dynamite, achieving the near impossible – honoring what came before (which lives on digitally for instant streaming comparison) while enhancing and expanding. The original film was an artifact of its day – social media wasn’t the monster it is now, cell phones were still a luxury for some, and fat-shaming and light homophobia were easy punch lines. Thankfully, Fey is a sensitive progressive who knows just what to walk back and what to bring forward. There is also more nuance in what a “mean girl” even is, highlighting that we are taught by a patriarchal society to turn on each other in a mistaken bid for relevance and that true relevance comes from embracing (and loving) the awkward in us all. 

To that end, one of the best additions to the script is a final act chat between protagonist Cady Harron (a relatable and temperate Angourie Rice, channeling a teen version of Amy Adams with less vocal prowess) and queen bee Regina George (an ass-kicking star turn by Renee Rapp who could be the love child of Madonna, Adele, and Will & Grace’s Karen Walker). The two run into each other in the restroom during their high school’s “Spring Fling.” If you know the original film, basically all the bad stuff has happened at this point, Regina is in a neck brace, and Cady has won the math competition. So this scene is just, well, a conversation – a long overdue one, between two human beings who have spent the past two hours misunderstanding each other, trying to outdo each other, and scoring points against each other. For the first time, we see them communing as beautifully vulnerable humans and as the kids they are. Don’t fret. The scene isn’t maudlin, and Rapp is far too gifted to not wring a laugh out of every moment; yet, this quiet scene is an important addition to the Mean Girls canon as it demonstrates the power of true connection.

I would be remiss – asleep at the switch in fact – if I didn’t give a huge shout out to Moana’s Auli’i Cravalho as tragicomic narrator/instigator Janis ‘Imi’ike and her partner in well-intentioned crime Jaquel Spivey playing Damian Hubbard. Whereas Cady was the heart and soul of the original film, the remake takes its cue from some of Shakespeare’s best comedies and shifts that spotlight onto the more interesting second bananas. Spivey is genius with the kind of zingers only the long-bullied can muster (“the safe joy of dancing with theatre boys”), but Cravalho nearly runs away with the picture: think Vanessa Hudgens meets Janeane Garafalo, yet still entirely her own creation. Lizzy Caplan was arch perfection as Janis Ian in the original Mean Girls, and Cravalho takes it all next level. The screen lights up every time she enters the frame. She channels brilliantly how so many of us felt in high school, still discovering our sarcastic abilities to critique the artifice of it all while hurting that we weren’t simply accepted for the differences that made us freakishly perfect.

I can’t wait to see what Cravalho – and Rapp – do next. The future is queer. And beautiful.

#Pandemic #GoldenGlobes musings via #socialmedia

28 February 2021

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My notes on a wildly uneven show, that ultimately found its footing after a literal amateur hour opening …

Let’s hope next year, we see some return to normalcy, whatever that once was. And we won’t have to play whack-a-mole trying to figure out where and how to watch the various movies and shows being honored.

Postscript from my wonderful ma Susie Sexton:

“at least borat won the night! i call that justice! otherwise, i kept forgetting what exactly i was watching or why….and maya rudolph did remind me of past mavens of the entertainment industry whom i would list here but i ain’t gonna! tina and amy got pretty feisty, did they not? in that opener? i guffawed in spite of myself as i feel feisty as well…they captured the essence of this nonsensically bizarro world.”

“Life is about putting it out there … and then swatting it away.” Sisters (2015)

23 December 2015

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Sisters_movie_poster

[Image Source: Wikipedia]

Tina Fey and Amy Poehler’s latest movie yukfest Sisters is more of a yuckfest. Ever since the seismic arrival of Kristin Wiig’s Bridesmaids, Hollywood has been smitten with this arguably unremarkable, though infinitely profitable, thesis: “Hey, women can be raunchy too!”

Yup, anybody can act like an 8th grader, regardless of one’s gender. The problem is that notion, in and of itself, is just not terribly interesting and, for anyone over 40 in the audience, can just seem kinda sad.

People forget that Bridesmaids and subsequent films like Anna Kendrick’s Pitch Perfect (the first one), Melissa McCarthy’s Spy, or Amy Schumer’s Trainwreck embraced debauchery with an anarchist’s glee and a feminist’s humanism. These films suggest that the great equalizer – across any number of markers: race, age, socioeconomics, faith, ethnicity, and, yes, gender – is our fundamentally base nature alongside our desire and ability to rise from the muck occasionally and do something kind or profound or, well, witty. You can poop in a sink, but you better make it matter.

Tina Fey’s Mean Girls was an early blueprint for these flicks, a sharp-edged, warm-hearted comic bottle rocket of a film in which gender meant everything and nothing, depicting the killing fields of the high school cafeteria where reductive reasoning and shallow judgment form the principle power currency. It’s a perfect film because it is a) gut-bustingly funny and b) discomfortingly trenchant.

Unfortunately, Sisters is only intermittently both, and it never fully gels. It has a lazy feel about it, as if old pals Fey and Poehler watched Risky Business and Sixteen Candles over a box of wine and thought it would be a lark to mount a Gen X mash-up tribute with middle-aged burnouts in the central roles.

As ideas go, that’s not the worst (nor freshest) high concept to come down the pike (see Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion), but it sure as heck needed more work before hitting cinemas this past weekend, aspiring as Sisters did to serve as Force Awakens’ counter-programming.

Fey and Poehler play against type as the titular siblings, with Fey as a “brassy” (her words) and hard-partying beautician/single mom and Poehler as a straight-arrow and newly divorced nurse/animal rescuer. Fey exclaims at one point, “Life is all about putting it out there,” to which Poehler mutters, “And then swatting it away.”

The Poehler/Fey dynamic has always been natural and warm if dangerously “in-jokey” – and that is true here as well. They have some sparkling moments, notably as they learn that their parents (a wry and believable Dianne Wiest and James Brolin) have sold the family home and moved to a pastel-hued, swingin’ yuppie condo complex without any warning to either daughter. With the kind of cracked passive aggressive logic that only occurs in movies like this, Fey and Poehler, unbeknownst to their folks, decide to have one last raging blow-out party (with all their former high school cronies) in the old homestead two days before its sale closes.

So, of course, the house gets completely destroyed in a simplistically escalating Rube Goldberg series of party hijinks. The kind of absurd crap that. does. not. happen. in. real. life. Has anyone actually ever witnessed a washing machine fill an entire home and its surrounding yard with copious bubbles because someone poured a whole bottle of detergent in the drum? No.

A rogues’ gallery of SNL and Comedy Central alums puts in appearances, to varying degrees of success. Samantha Bee, Kate McKinnon, Rachel Dratch, and Chris Parnell all suffer from underwritten roles with lame jokes and even worse ad libs. Bobby Moynihan is just plum obnoxiously unfunny as a past-his-prime class clown. The character is supposed to be moronic, but in Moynihan’s hands he is teeth-gratingly so.

Maya Rudolph has a Teflon-like ability to rise above (and rescue) just about any material, and she soars as a suburban doyenne who at first glance seems to be an assured Queen Bee bully but whose inner life is more longstanding adolescent alienation than smug superiority. John Cena continues to surprise with comedic home-runs, after this summer’s Trainwreck, as a stoically cerebral drug dealer with a soft spot for Dirty Dancing. John Leguizamo shows up as a skeezy former high school boyfriend of Fey’s, and, while he is always a welcome presence, his talents seem wasted here. Mad TV‘s Ike Barinholtz gives the movie its sweetness as a bemused potential beau smitten with Poehler’s quirky, self-conscious charms.

The film stumbles toward a resolution that is as forced as it is predictable. Fey’s character has a daughter (a painfully mincing and whiny performance from Madison Davenport) who hates her mother’s arrested development and is forced to couch surf from friend’s house to friend’s house since Fey can’t manage to keep a roof over their heads. The inevitable confrontation of mother and daughter and sister and parents is utterly contrived, borrowing equal bits from an episode of Lassie, Animal House, and The Family Stone.

Ultimately, Poehler fares best in the film, bringing poignant bite and rag doll charm to her role. It’s a shame that she and Fey (with director Jason Moore and screenwriter Paula Pell) couldn’t have worked out a better movie to feature Poehler’s character, focusing less on the shock humor and the messily filmed bacchanalia and more on the tricky web of love and fear shared between siblings, sisters trapped by the hollow promises of high school juvenilia – two emotionally stunted Gen X Americans for whom those scruffy, mixed-up four years of public education are the alpha and omega of intellectual and social development.

Image by Lee Gaddis of Gaddis Gaming

Image by Lee Gaddis of Gaddis Gaming

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Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital)In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.

 

“Oh, facts and opinions, who can tell them apart?” Pixar’s Inside Out

3 July 2015

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[Image Source: Wikipedia]

When it comes to Pixar, I’m a sucker for their more esoteric/existential offerings: Up, WALL-E, Ratatouille, and The Incredibles. If you had told me twenty years ago that there would be an animation super-company that synthesizes the works of Sartre, Camus, Beckett, Chaplin … and Abbott & Costello for mass-market, blockbuster consumption, well, I would have simply replied, “Why are we here?” (Cue existentialist rim shot.)

No film in the Pixar canon, though, can compare for sheer WTF meaning-of-life audacity to their latest Inside Out. I loved this movie for its gentle heart, its minimalist humor, and its sly message that all emotions are valid and essential, not just that most-favored nation: technicolor, buoyant, “have a blessed day” joy.

The film details the awkward transition of a sweet, beloved only child (Riley, charmingly voiced by Kaitlyn Dias) as she and her parents relocate from their small-town home in Minnesota to the big city life of San Francisco. The transition isn’t an easy one, as the family’s belongings are lost mid-transit, Riley finds herself missing friends and activities from her previous life, and her new school offers little reprieve. Complicating (or causing?) these challenges are a series of misadventures from the voices living in Riley’s head.

When I saw the first preview several months ago, I admit I was dubious about the central conceit: that our emotional inner life can be distilled into five warring character traits: Joy (Amy Poehler), Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Mindy Kaling), Fear (Bill Hader), and Sadness (Phyllis Smith). From the looks of things, I feared that Pixar had swiped the concept of that odd 70s construct Mr. Men and Little Miss, whereby we Me-Era kindergartners learned about our thorniest of emotions and the need to share and play well with others via a series of easy-to-read, infinitely merchandised board-books. And lest we not forget the acid trip “Free To Be You and Me” musings of holiday specials from Rankin/Bass and Sid and Marty Krofft where the fight for one’s psychological well-being could be enacted through feuding Claymation characters representing weather fronts or trippy sea monsters and Phyllis Diller witches. How we Gen X’ers survived, I’ll never know.

(We also had the short-lived, early 90s sitcom Herman’s Head, likely crafted by someone weaned on the animated output of the Children’s Television Workshop but with a naughtier spin, in which a young writer had every decision dictated by a group of wise-cracking Jiminy Crickets cohabiting in his cranium. Interestingly, that show, like Pixar’s Inside Out, was executive produced by Disney.)

How wrong I was! (And apologies for the digression into artifacts of my childhood – Inside Out is so good, you can’t help but plumb the depths of your youth upon exiting the theater.)

The film does share its DNA with earlier cinematic/television efforts to explain psychology to kids and adults alike, but it is also very much its own unique creation. Director Peter Docter (who helmed Up as well as Monsters, Inc.) is in his element constructing richly detailed mythology for us all to understand and appreciate the colors (quite literally) of our emotional responses. With Inside out, the primal depth of Up (I dare you not to watch the opening sequence of that film and find yourself in poignant Ingmar Bergman puddle) finds a new home in the Rube Goldberg whimsy of Monsters, Inc. as Docter and his team give us an Oz-like travelogue through the various geographies in one’s brain.

After a mix-up involving some precious long-term memories, sending Riley on a prepubescent spiral of self-doubt, Joy and Sadness find themselves on the unlikeliest of road-trips, navigating Riley’s id, ego, and superego in order to right a sinking ship.

There are many clever asides and surprises along the way, and I dare not spoil a one. I will note, however, that I guffawed loudest at a bit where Joy stumbles over what appears to be a large box of placards, jumbling them all. She comments, “Oh, facts and opinions, who can tell them apart?” In these contentious times, truer words may have never been spoken in an animated film.

At the halfway point, the heartbreaking soul of the film makes his shaggy, sad-sack appearance. Richard Kind is exceptionally voice-cast as Riley’s elephant-nosed, cotton candy-bodied, cat-tailed imaginary friend Bing Bong. As Riley’s life has evolved, Bing Bong has become a stranger in a strange land, a Didi/Gogo whose tears take the form of cellophane-wrapped candy pieces. As he assists and occasionally misleads Joy and Sadness from the dark recesses of Riley’s brain, he insinuates his way into the audience’s heart, and his ultimate sacrifice (not saying what) is as devastating a moment as you’ll see in cinemas this year. (At least it was for this weirdo who still personifies all of his childhood toys and can’t bring himself to part with a one.)

The film’s final message for us all? (One I find so very important.) Every feeling is valid and shapes who we are. Sadness is as crucial as joy, anger as essential as fear or disgust. To force happiness when it isn’t immediately evident is to cause even greater sadness and disruption. Embrace who you are and how you feel in the moment, and embrace that honesty in others as well. We will all be that much happier as a result.

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Reel Roy Reviews 2

Reel Roy Reviews 2

Reel Roy Reviews is now TWO books! You can purchase your copies by clicking here (print and digital) In addition to online ordering at Amazon or from the publisher Open Books, the first book is currently is being carried by Bookbound, Common Language Bookstore, and Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room in Ann Arbor, Michigan and by Green Brain Comics in Dearborn, Michigan. My mom Susie Duncan Sexton’s Secrets of an Old Typewriter series is also available on Amazon and at Bookbound and Common Language.